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Got Seaweed? – By @CocoShellim

By Coco Shellim

 

Got Seaweed?

Can we make seaweed juice the new milk? Just imagine, kids at primary school slurping their seaweed juice through a straw made from seaweed out of bottle, you guessed it, made from seaweed!

 

This is the dream and let me tell you why. 

 

Seaweed has more calcium than milk.

We all remember being told to finish our milk to get strong bones. You get strong bones from calcium and milk is about as calcium rich as you can get. For some reason when we get older the idea of having a full glass of milk seems wrong. How often do you see someone drinking a glass of straight milk?

 

Milk is bad for the planet.

Agriculture is one of the biggest causes of climate change. Forests get cleared to make room for the cows or the crops to feed the cows. The cows eat the plants we have grown to fatten up. And then the cows fart gallons of methane into our air. A couple of years ago, being dairy free was often only due to a lactose intolerance, now with the vegan hype, you can find oat milk, almond milk, hazelnut milk, and probably a hundred others.

 

Milk is bad for cows.

Cows have a pretty shit life in the dairy industry. 

 

Seaweed is good for the planet.

Seaweed is one of the very few foods which actually has a positive environmental impact. It removes toxins from the seawater as it grows. There are even a few people attempting to clean up polluter waterways by farming seaweed in them. Growing seaweed has a negative carbon footprint, it absorbs about 20% more carbon than it produces, that’s five times more carbon than land plants. 

 

Seaweed is good for cows.

Growing seaweed doesn’t really affect the cows. But, some people have been feeding cows seaweed and this has actually stopped them farting methane by 60%. This is irrelevant but weirdly interesting.

 

There is lots of it.

The ocean covers 70% of our planet but only accounts for a tiny percentage of our food. There’s thousands of varieties we have yet to try.

 

Growing it is easy.

You don’t need fertiliser, you don’t need to water it and you don’t need to cut down trees to grow it. It also grows at super speed, up to 12 feet in a few months. 

 

Seaweed is really really good for you.

It’s no secret that the Japanese love seaweed, did you also know that they have the longest life expectancy, almost 10 years longer than Americans! Chalk it down to their seaweed consumption.

 

Seaweed can be plastic.

There are start ups making bottles out of seaweed, so the seaweed milk would have to come in a prepackaged seaweed container. Today, the London marathon runners are being given seaweed pouches of water instead of plastic bottles. 

 

 

The only downside is seaweed doesn’t taste great. So we’re going to have to do that bit. Time for experimenting and taste-testing. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make a drink of seaweed appetising at all, please let me know.

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